by Neil Gaiman
Oliver said, “Get in there, Shadow. Through the gap in the wall. Quickly, now. Or I’ll have him chew off your face.”
Shadow’s arm was bleeding, but he got up and squeezed through the gap into the darkness without arguing. If he stayed out there, with the beast, he would die soon, and die in pain. He knew that with as much certainty as he knew that the sun would rise tomorrow.
“Well, yes,” said Cassie’s voice in his head. “It’s going to rise. But unless you get your shit together you are never going to see it.”
There was barely space for him and Cassie’s body in the cavity behind the wall. He had seen the expression of pain and fury on her face, like the face of the cat in the glass box, and then he knew she, too, had been entombed here while alive.
Oliver picked up a rock from the ground, and placed it onto the wall, in the gap. “My own theory,” he said, hefting a second rock and putting it into position, “is that it is the prehistoric dire wolf. But it is bigger than ever the dire wolf was. Perhaps it is the monster of our dreams, when we huddled in caves. Perhaps it was simply a wolf, but we were smaller, little hominids who could never run fast enough to get away.”
Shadow leaned against the rock face behind him. He squeezed his left arm with his right hand to try to stop the bleeding. “This is Wod’s Hill,” said Shadow. “And that’s Wod’s dog. I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“It doesn’t matter.” More stones were placed on stones.
“Ollie,” said Shadow. “The beast is going to kill you. It’s already inside you. It’s not a good thing.”
“Old Shuck’s not going to hurt me. Old Shuck loves me. Cassie’s in the wall,” said Oliver, and he dropped a rock on top of the others with a crash. “Now you are in the wall with her. Nobody’s waiting for you. Nobody’s going to come looking for you. Nobody is going to cry for you. Nobody’s going to miss you.”
There were, Shadow knew, although he could never have told a soul how he knew, three of them, not two, in that tiny space. There was Cassie Burglass, there in body (rotted and dried and still stinking of decay) and there in soul, and there was also something else, something that twined about his legs, and then butted gently at his injured hand. A voice spoke to him, from somewhere close. He knew that voice, although the accent was unfamiliar.
It was the voice that a cat would speak in, if a cat were a woman: expressive, dark, musical. The voice said, You should not be here, Shadow. You have to stop, and you must take action. You are letting the rest of the world make your decisions for you.
Shadow said aloud, “That’s not entirely fair, Bast.”
“You have to be quiet,” said Oliver, gently. “I mean it.” The stones of the wall were being replaced rapidly and efficiently. Already they were up to Shadow’s chest.
Mrr. No? Sweet thing, you really have no idea. No idea who you are or what you are or what that means. If he walls you up in here to die in this hill, this temple will stand forever—and whatever hodgepodge of belief these locals have will work for them and will make magic. But the sun will still go down on them, and all the skies will be gray. All things will mourn, and they will not know what they are mourning for. The world will be worse—for people, for cats, for the remembered, for the forgotten. You have died and you have returned. You matter, Shadow, and you must not meet your death here, a sad sacrifice hidden in a hillside.
“So what are you suggesting I do?” he whispered.
Fight. The Beast is a thing of mind. It’s taking its power from you, Shadow. You are near, and so it’s become more real. Real enough to own Oliver. Real enough to hurt you.
“Me?”
“You think ghosts can talk to everyone?” asked Cassie Burglass’s voice in the darkness, urgently. “We are moths. And you are the flame.”
“What should I do?” asked Shadow. “It hurt my arm. It damn near ripped out my throat.”
Oh, sweet man. It’s just a shadow-thing. It’s a night-dog. It’s just an overgrown jackal.
“It’s real,” Shadow said. The last of the stones was being banged into place.
“Are you truly scared of your father’s dog?” said a woman’s voice. Goddess or ghost, Shadow did not know.
But he knew the answer. Yes. Yes, he was scared.
His left arm was only pain, and unusable, and his right hand was slick and sticky with his blood. He was entombed in a cavity between a wall and rock. But he was, for now, alive.
“Get your shit together,” said Cassie. “I’ve done everything I can. Do it.”
He braced himself against the rocks behind the wall, and he raised his feet. Then he kicked both his booted feet out together, as hard as he could. He had walked so many miles in the last few months. He was a big man, and he was stronger than most. He put everything he had behind that kick.
The wall exploded.
The Beast was on him, the black dog of despair, but this time Shadow was prepared for it. This time he was the aggressor. He grabbed at it.
I will not be my father’s dog.
With his right hand he held the beast’s jaw closed. He stared into its green eyes. He did not believe the beast was a dog at all, not really.
It’s daylight, said Shadow to the dog, with his mind, not with his voice. Run away. Whatever you are, run away. Run back to your gibbet, run back to your grave, little wish hound. All you can do is depress us, fill the world with shadows and illusions. The age when you ran with the wild hunt, or hunted terrified humans, it’s over. I don’t know if you’re my father’s dog or not. But you know what? I don’t care.
With that, Shadow took a deep breath and let go of the dog’s muzzle.
It did not attack. It made a noise, a baffled whine deep in its throat that was almost a whimper.
“Go home,” said Shadow, aloud.
The dog hesitated. Shadow thought for a moment then that he had won, that he was safe, that the dog would simply go away. But then the creature lowered its head, raised the ruff around its neck, and bared its teeth. It would not leave, Shadow knew, until he was dead.
The corridor in the hillside was filling with light: the rising sun shone directly into it. Shadow wondered if the people who had built it, so long ago, had aligned their temple to the sunrise. He took a step to the side, stumbled on something, and fell awkwardly to the ground.
Beside Shadow on the grass was Oliver, sprawled and unconscious. Shadow had tripped over his leg. The man’s eyes were closed; he made a growling sound in the back of his throat, and Shadow heard the same sound, magnified and triumphant, from the dark beast that filled the mouth of the temple.
Shadow was down, and hurt, and was, he knew, a dead man.
Something soft touched his face, gently.
Something else brushed his hand. Shadow glanced to his side, and he understood. He understood why Bast had been with him in this place, and he understood who had brought her.
They had been ground up and sprinkled on these fields more than a hundred years before, stolen from the earth around the temple of Bastet and Beni Hasan. Tons upon tons of them, mummified cats in their thousands, each cat a tiny representation of the deity, each cat an act of worship preserved for an eternity.
They were there, in that space, beside him: brown and sand-colored and shadowy gray, cats with leopard spots and cats with tiger stripes, wild, lithe and ancient. These were not the local cats Bast had sent to watch him the previous day. These were the ancestors of those cats, of all our modern cats, from Egypt, from the Nile Delta, from thousands of years ago, brought here to make things grow.
They trilled and chirruped, they did not meow.
The black dog growled louder but now it made no move to attack. Shadow forced himself into a sitting position. “I thought I told you to go home, Shuck,” he said.
The dog did not move. Shadow opened his right hand, and gestured. It was a gesture of dismissal, of impatience. Finish this.
The cats sprang, with ease, as if choreographed. They landed on the beast, each of them
a coiled spring of fangs and claws, both as sharp as they had ever been in life. Pin-sharp claws sank into the black flanks of the huge beast, tore at its eyes. It snapped at them, angrily, and pushed itself against the wall, toppling more rocks, in an attempt to shake them off, but without success. Angry teeth sank into its ears, its muzzle, its tail, its paws.
The beast yelped and growled, and then it made a noise which, Shadow thought, would, had it come from any human throat, have been a scream.
Shadow was never certain what happened then. He watched the black dog put its muzzle down to Oliver’s mouth, and push, hard. He could have sworn that the creature stepped into Oliver, like a bear stepping into a river.
Oliver shook, violently, on the sand.
The scream faded, and the beast was gone, and sunlight filled the space on the hill.
Shadow felt himself shivering. He felt like he had just woken up from a waking sleep; emotions flooded through him, like sunlight: fear and revulsion and grief and hurt, deep hurt.
There was anger in there, too. Oliver had tried to kill him, he knew, and he was thinking clearly for the first time in days.
A man’s voice shouted, “Hold up! Everyone all right over there?”
A high bark, and a lurcher ran in, sniffed at Shadow, his back against the wall, sniffed at Oliver Bierce, unconscious on the ground, and at the remains of Cassie Burglass.
A man’s silhouette filled the opening to the outside world, a gray paper cutout against the rising sun.
“Needles! Leave it!” he said. The dog returned to the man’s side. The man said, “I heard someone screaming. Leastways, I wouldn’t swear to it being a someone. But I heard it. Was that you?”
And then he saw the body, and he stopped. “Holy fucking mother of all fucking bastards,” he said.
“Her name was Cassie Burglass,” said Shadow.
“Moira’s old girlfriend?” said the man. Shadow knew him as the landlord of the pub, could not remember whether he had ever known the man’s name. “Bloody Nora. I thought she went to London.”
Shadow felt sick.
The landlord was kneeling beside Oliver. “His heart’s still beating,” he said. “What happened to him?”
“I’m not sure,” said Shadow. “He screamed when he saw the body—you must have heard him. Then he just went down. And your dog came in.”
The man looked at Shadow, worried. “And you? Look at you! What happened to you, man?”
“Oliver asked me to come up here with him. Said he had something awful he had to get off his chest.” Shadow looked at the wall on each side of the corridor. There were other bricked-in nooks there. Shadow had a good idea of what would be found behind them if any of them were opened. “He asked me to help him open the wall. I did. He knocked me over as he went down. Took me by surprise.”
“Did he tell you why he had done it?”
“Jealousy,” said Shadow. “Just jealous of Moira and Cassie, even after Moira had left Cassie for him.”
The man exhaled, shook his head. “Bloody hell,” he said. “Last bugger I’d expect to do anything like this. Needles! Leave it!” He pulled a cell phone from his pocket, and called the police. Then he excused himself. “I’ve got a bag of game to put aside until the police have cleared out,” he explained.
Shadow got to his feet, and inspected his arms. His sweater and coat were both ripped in the left arm, as if by huge teeth, but his skin was unbroken beneath it. There was no blood on his clothes, no blood on his hands.
He wondered what his corpse would have looked like, if the black dog had killed him.
Cassie’s ghost stood beside him, and looked down at her body, half-fallen from the hole in the wall. The corpse’s fingertips and the fingernails were wrecked, Shadow observed, as if she had tried, in the hours or the days before she died, to dislodge the rocks of the wall.
“Look at that,” she said, staring at herself. “Poor thing. Like a cat in a glass box.” Then she turned to Shadow. “I didn’t actually fancy you,” she said. “Not even a little bit. I’m not sorry. I just needed to get your attention.”
“I know,” said Shadow. “I just wish I’d met you when you were alive. We could have been friends.”
“I bet we would have been. It was hard in there. It’s good to be done with all of this. And I’m sorry, Mr. American. Try not to hate me.”
Shadow’s eyes were watering. He wiped his eyes on his shirt. When he looked again, he was alone in the passageway.
“I don’t hate you,” he told her.
He felt a hand squeeze his hand. He walked outside, into the morning sunlight, and he breathed and shivered, and listened to the distant sirens.
Two men arrived and carried Oliver off on a stretcher, down the hill to the road where an ambulance took him away, siren screaming to alert any sheep on the lanes that they should shuffle back to the grass verge.
A female police officer turned up as the ambulance disappeared, accompanied by a younger male officer. They knew the landlord, whom Shadow was not surprised to learn was also a Scathelocke, and were both impressed by Cassie’s remains, to the point that the young male officer left the passageway and vomited into the ferns.
If it occurred to either of them to inspect the other bricked-in cavities in the corridor, for evidence of centuries-old crimes, they managed to suppress the idea, and Shadow was not going to suggest it.
He gave them a brief statement, then rode with them to the local police station, where he gave a fuller statement to a large police officer with a serious beard. The officer appeared mostly concerned that Shadow was provided with a mug of instant coffee, and that Shadow, as an American tourist, would not form a mistaken impression of rural England. “It’s not like this up here normally. It’s really quiet. Lovely place. I wouldn’t want you to think we were all like this.”
Shadow assured him that he didn’t think that at all.
VI
THE RIDDLE
Moira was waiting for him when he came out of the police station. She was standing with a woman in her early sixties, who looked comfortable and reassuring, the sort of person you would want at your side in a crisis.
“Shadow, this is Doreen. My sister.”
Doreen shook hands, explaining she was sorry she hadn’t been able to be there during the last week, but she had been moving house.
“Doreen’s a county court judge,” explained Moira.
Shadow could not easily imagine this woman as a judge.
“They are waiting for Ollie to come around,” said Moira. “Then they are going to charge him with murder.” She said it thoughtfully, but in the same way she would have asked Shadow where he thought she ought to plant some snapdragons.
“And what are you going to do?”
She scratched her nose. “I’m in shock. I have no idea what I’m doing anymore. I keep thinking about the last few years. Poor, poor Cassie. She never thought there was any malice in him.”
“I never liked him,” said Doreen, and she sniffed. “Too full of facts for my liking, and he never knew when to stop talking. Just kept wittering on. Like he was trying to cover something up.”
“Your backpack and your laundry are in Doreen’s car,” said Moira. “I thought we could give you a lift somewhere, if you needed one. Or if you want to get back to rambling, you can walk.”
“Thank you,” said Shadow. He knew he would never be welcome in Moira’s little house, not anymore.
Moira said, urgently, angrily, as if it was all she wanted to know, “You said you saw Cassie. You told us, yesterday. That was what sent Ollie off the deep end. It hurt me so much. Why did you say you’d seen her, if she was dead? You couldn’t have seen her.”
Shadow had been wondering about that, while he had been giving his police statement. “Beats me,” he said. “I don’t believe in ghosts. Probably a local, playing some kind of game with the Yankee tourist.”
Moira looked at him with fierce hazel eyes, as if she was trying to believe him but was un
able to make the final leap of faith. Her sister reached down and held her hand. “More things in heaven and earth, Horatio. I think we should just leave it at that.”
Moira looked at Shadow, unbelieving, angered, for a long time, before she took a deep breath and said, “Yes. Yes, I suppose we should.”
There was silence in the car. Shadow wanted to apologize to Moira, to say something that would make things better.
They drove past the gibbet tree.
“There were ten tongues within one head,” recited Doreen, in a voice slightly higher and more formal than the one in which she had previously spoken. “And one went out to fetch some bread, to feed the living and the dead. That was a riddle written about this corner, and that tree.”
“What does it mean?”
“A wren made a nest inside the skull of a gibbeted corpse, flying in and out of the jaw to feed its young. In the midst of death, as it were, life just keeps on happening.”
Shadow thought about the matter for a little while, and told her that he guessed that it probably did.
October 2014
Florida/New York/Paris
PERMISSIONS
Some of the pieces appearing in this collection were first published elsewhere, permission and copyright information as follows:
Introduction copyright © 2014 by Neil Gaiman.
“Making a Chair” copyright © 2011 by Neil Gaiman. First appeared on the CD An Evening with Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. Biting Dog Press limited edition, Broadsheets, 2011.
“A Lunar Labyrinth” copyright © 2013 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe.
“The Thing About Cassandra” copyright © 2010 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Songs of Love and Death.
“Down to a Sunless Sea” copyright © 2013 by Neil Gaiman. First published online at www.guardian.com.
“‘The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains . . .’” copyright © 2010 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Stories.
“My Last Landlady” copyright © 2010 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Off the Coastal Path: Dark Poems of the Seaside.
